1695489 - large amounts of bookmarks at risk of deletion

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement, P5)

Description

[bugzzz]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 11.2; rv:86.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/86.0

Steps to reproduce:

Hello,

first off, this is not an actual bug, but still a potential source of high frustration for users.

As far as I can see, the Firefox Bookmark Manager will delete a bookmarks folder immediately without any safety question. This could means that a user could delete ALL their bookmarks by mistake, for example believing the caret /activation is elsewhere when pressing delete. Deleting folders can also happen unnoticed. (I know there is the possibilty to undo deletion which is an excellent feature.)

Chrome and Edge both alsways show a dialogue at the bottom / top of page after bookmark deletion: "XY delete. Undo?"

Suggestion for improvement:

1. Add to about:config an option "bookmark deletion dialogue on/only folders/off"
2. At the top left of the bookmark manager, there is an icon with two arrows (in German: "Lesezeichen importieren und sichern" /import and save bookmarks). To the right of this icon, the last delete action should show up: "XYZ... delete. Undo?". Upon hover on the field, the full name of the delete item should show up in the typical yellowish hover text bubble.
   Many people do not konw that deletion can be undone, because it looks like a file manager.
   Please also do consider a dialogue as describe in "1.". This would be the safest for people that work with extensive amounts of bookmarks for work, that are the result of weeks of research.

Thank you.

Actual results:

Bookmark folder was deleted by mistake because there is no dialogue.

Expected results:

There should be various safety measures so people won't lose their work. (Backups don't solve this because they are mostly not continuously done, and most people don't keep backups at all or know how to handle them.)

Comment 1

[bugzzz]

I wanted to add the comment that by "1" I meant an actual dialoge that forces interaction before being able to actually proceed with deleting the object.

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Bookmarks & History' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Firefox offers Undo/Redo functionality on bookmarks in the session, so one can always open the Library window and undo the removal in case of mistake.
Alternatively, we also offer at least 15 days of backups, always accessible from the Library window backup menu.

I'll keep the bug open as an enhancement to make the undo option more visible/discoverable, that it's a known problem from some time.

Comment 4

[Virginia (please send need info request to Brindusa Tot)]

Hi,

Based on the comments on this thread, I'll mark this ticket as NEW for visibility.

Regards,
Virginia

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

It may be reasonable to ask for confirmation when more than N bookmarks are being removed, we'll evaluate that.